Danny Jones Podcast - #129 - The 'Picasso' of Counterfeiting: How to Print Fake Money | Jeff Turner

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Jeff Turner is a counterfeiter who was just released from federal prison. Throughout his criminal career, Jeff has printed over $1 million in fake US $100 bills. help us make more money: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon sponsors  https://liquiddeath.com -  Use code KONCRETE at checkout to get a free koozie 2-pack with a 12-pack purchase. danny  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we go like into your like your history, just tell people listening basically what your story, why you went to, why you got in trouble? Why did you go to prison? Uh, it was a federal indictment for conspiracy to counterfeit U.S. obligations. Okay. So you were manufacturing money? Yes. Selling them, passing them myself. Um, yeah, manufacturing.

Wow. And how much, how much money did you create and how did you, how did you, How did you go about, how did you just get into this? How did you get into making and manufacturing your own money? You're making $100 bills? Yeah, I mean, I did 20s and 50s, but, you know, it comes to a point to where every $20 bill is pointless when you could do $100. You know what I mean? It's just maximize the profit.

And, you know, basically I read when I was like 19, I saw this book with The Art of Making Money. It's about a counterfeiter up in Chicago, Art Williams. and you know I read that and it just kind of like get a little bit closer to my basically uh you know the best way to make money as far as I was concerned was making money you know so I just studied you know read as many things as I could I read that book which kind of inspired me to try it you know um and uh I took a cut like one or two of the methods that he used which was good methods but I tweaked them and um so basically he was using like two pieces of paper and gluing them together to embed a strip and a watermark.

So I went that route. That's obviously the best way to do it. There's a lot of people that like will take $5 bills and bleach them and print hundreds on them, but then the strip still says USA5 and it's a different watermark and all that. so um but i wanted to make them from scratch so basically i started doing it a little bit when i was 19 or 20 i made made some money and then just stopped you know i didn't want to get caught it was just a quick thing um so back when i moved or when i moved to knoxville and kind of got myself in a desperate financial situation um i knew i could fall back on that you know what i mean i and I decided to start doing it again.

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That's what I've been told. When you first did it, did you like, were you more so, were you doing it specifically just because you needed to make money, or were you doing it like, hey, let me see, like, if I could be good at this. Like, this will be fun to try. Or was it just desperation? Well, I mean, at first it was desperation, obviously, like, at first.

And then, so my plan was to kind of, like, you know, make these hundreds kind of sell them to people I knew for, you know, $0.25 on the dollar. So if I were to sell you $10,000, you know, you give me $2,000 or $2,500 for it. And that was kind of my original plan was to just do that a few times to make enough money to get into a new house and, you know, to live until I found another job and this and that. But after I did it, you know, I want a buddy of mine that I worked with at that sign company ended up being like a really large drug dealer. which I didn't even know. I went over to his house one day and all this.

Like I knew he sold some weed, maybe a little bit of coke. But I went over to his house one day and he had like bricks of, you know, heroin, meth, cocaine, all this stuff. So basically I gave him the idea. I'm like, listen, I used to counterfeit. I can make these bills. And if you want to re-up in Atlanta, go down to Atlanta and re-up with your, you know, supply. You can throw some of these in there. So we kind of did that as like a trial run.

He went to Atlanta, but I'm not sure the exact amount, but I think I gave him like $5,000 in, I think it was 20s at first. And it, you know, everything went fine, so started kind of perfecting the hundreds. So like the two, I found that basically the best paper to use for sandwiching two sheets together was Bible paper. It's really, really thin and opaque to where you could, you know, print the front of a bill and the back of a bill, and then on the back of the back, print a strip and a watermark. And then, like, mist on a little bit of gorilla glue spray, squeege them together. You know, I had a piece of glass with LED lights behind it,

so you could see through the bills to line everything up. Wow. Squeegee them together. and then I've found the counterfeit pens are a chemical reaction. So when you test a bill, it's iodine-based ink. So the iodine in the ink reacts to starch in the paper, which turns it black thing. So real money, it stays yellow, you know what I mean?

And counterfeit will stay black. So I figured out that spraying the bills with a lacquer spray. It's basically like clear spray paint. a matte lacquer, um, basically created a barrier, you know, and prevented the chemical reaction between the pen and the,

in the paper, you know what I mean. Mm-hmm. So, um, and I'd tweak things here and there and find different methods that worked significantly well. Um,

like once you glue the bills together, uh, if you, if you spray a thick coat first, to, to make sure that the counterfeit pens don't, you know, react with the starch in the paper.

and then let that dry and then spray another coat from a distance. It kind of mists on and it gives it a texture. So like basically, and I sometimes iron the bills just a little bit to make them nice and crispy and, you know, rigid. And I found this iridescent green eye shadow, which is basically just a color shifting pigment that they sell as makeup. and I could take a, it's like a shader pen, which is an invisible ink pen, and dip it in the, the eyeshadow, and color on the little color shifting 100 in the corner.

And there was, they've got invisible ink UV pens, which, like, are basically marketed to, like, little girls' diaries. You know what I mean? You can write in the diary, and nobody can read it, and then you shine the black light, and it. So I found those in red ink. So I'd take a ruler over where the strip is and draw a line. That way, if anybody put the bills in a black light,

the strip would appear to glow red as well. So I knew, like, with all those features, beat, you know, there's really no way that anyone could prove that these bills were fake if they even suspected it. You know what I mean? Because it marks with the pen. It's got the strip in the water, mark in it, color shifting ink, it glows in the backlight.

The only way that really you could tell is if you put it in a machine to check the magnetic ink, like a bill validator or money counters at banks. So by the time the bills hit the bank, the bank would discover they were fake. But at that point, you know, it would be a week later. Nobody on the street could ever find out. No. I've had bankers. One time I went into a Chinese food restaurant and went to break it.

And it was this little old Chinese woman. She was holding it up and she wasn't sure. So one of her regular customers was a banker. And he was sitting over there. So he's like, oh, is this bill real and gave it to him? And he said it was real. So I've had a drug deal. I mean, one drug dealer, I gave him a bill and told them that they were fake.

I was like, you know, you want to start buying these from me. He didn't believe me that they were fake. Because once they mark with it, I mean, everybody just marks it. with a pen or, you know, holds it up to look for a strip or a watermark or, you know what I mean? What does that actually do when they mark them with the pen? Basically, it's a, so it's an ink in the pen that's iodine based. Okay. That iodine reacts with starch.

So all paper is treated with starch, except for, you know, currency money. Oh, okay. So if you mark any regular paper, it'll mark black because the iodine reacts with that starch and turns black. whereas real money doesn't. So it stays yellow. So it's just a way to, you know, the pens are, you know, to detect counterfeit currency. But like I said, I would spray my bills with a lacquer.

That's what the lacquer did. Yeah. So when you go to mark the paper, you're really not touching the paper because there's a clear coat of lacquer over it to separate the pen from the paper. Okay. It seems like a very intricate process and a long process. Like how, like when you started doing this at scale, like printing thousands and thousands of dollars, like, I can't imagine what, like, how would your process change?

Like, you're doing this with Bible paper still? Yeah. And like the hardest part was acquiring the Bible paper, really. I would take road trips all up the East Coast pretty much to go to cities, to go to bookstores and rip out blank pages. because a Bible has like anywhere from 2 to 20 blank pages in the back usually. So, you know, if you go into a Barnes & Noble or bookstore or whatever and open a Bible and I just have a little razor knife and cut 10 blank pages out, do that over and over again. So say if there's five blank pages in each Bible and you're in a bookstore with 100 Bibles,

you know, I mean that's 500 pages, which is, you know, you could make $25,000 off of one bookstore. Wow. So, but I mean, it got to the point where eventually I'd already been to every bookstore in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, up to Lexington, Cleveland. Holy shit. But, yeah, so I was basically selling, I wanted to just sell these bills to people. And not use them? No, I did. I was nervous, you know what I mean?

Because, like, I knew, like, I would constantly, you know, analyze these bills. I always try and make them better. You know what I mean? But you kind of get in your head. You wonder, like, I think they look good, but you sit there and look at something all day, every day. You wonder if, you know. You're paying attention to the finest detail level.

You see everything that's wrong with them probably, right? Yeah. So the first time I went, I think, for whatever reason, I just grew the balls, walked into a Taco Bell, and she held it up, and boom, cashed it. No problem. So, okay, you know. They kind of started doing more shopping sprees, you know.

I mean, you hit up a couple more places. They take it, no problem. Every other time, they'd either mark it with the pen or hold it up. A couple people sometimes would, you know, analyze it a little bit. But like I said, there's every feature is beat. I mean, the bills looked pretty much perfect. You know what I mean? I changed all the serial numbers on each bill.

That way, you never had more than one bill with the same serial number. You know, so. And there's different, different ways to like do it without getting caught obviously you know you park in like a parking lot over here and you know walk a few hundred feet just so no cameras in the parking lot can maybe get your license played or whatever so you might park in one section over here and then like walk to a a mall or in an area with lots of businesses and you could just hit up you know each business so yeah that was way more profitable than i mean i also sold them too right but

But, you know, for $10,000, I could sell it for $2,500 or I could just go spend $10,000. Okay. You know, so once I got the confidence, like, yeah, these are all passing. No problem. You know, I started doing both. Okay. Just selling them to multiple drug dealers throughout Knoxville. It's buying prepaid visa cards, getting money orders.

Oh, wow. You know what I mean? If I found, like, prepaid visa cards have, like, a $3 fee added onto it. So if you get $100 prepaid visa cards, you get $100 prepaid, card it'll be like $103, $104. So you give them $200 bills and you get $95 change and $100 prepaid visa card. And if you go to like a Walmart and hit up like the electronic center register and the garden center and a couple registers up front, I mean, you're making $1,000 just for that,

you know, that one Walmart. And I just hit up stores like that all day, every day for years. At what point or was there a point where things kind of got sketchy or, where to your, at the point where you're thinking in your head, like, this might be a little bit too good to be true. Like, I got to start watching my back a little bit more. Like, this, it can't be this, I can't be right. This gravy train is not going to last forever.

Yeah. At what point did shit start to get, go sideways? Well, my original plan was to just sell them to drug dealers, basically. But ultimately, I had a drug habit at the time as well. So a lot of it was ripping off drug dealers, you know, buying the heroin with it, you know. So most of the guys, like I'd get one drug dealer for, you know, spend 500 bucks, 500 bucks, a thousand bucks, you know, until it kind of stacked up to where I got this guy for, you know, 10 grand, five grand, something like that. And usually the guys weren't even mad if they did find out because they were able to, I mean, it was. They used to do.

Right. Yeah. They could go re-up. They went to the store. So a lot of the guys, if they did find out, they were just like, holy shit, you got me. Like, you know what I mean? Good job. And now they wanted to buy them from me because now they knew that they were fake.

They'd be like, well, if you're going to buy 500. That's a weird thing, right? It's kind of like you screwed me, but I didn't get screwed. Yeah. They respect the game. Yeah. Chalk it up as loss, but they didn't really lose anything. So they were just, you know, impressed.

They were like, oh, shit, you made these all right. Keep selling them to me. Or, you know. Maybe like I'd keep buying heroin from them, but instead of giving them $100 for a gram, I'd give them $400 for a gram because they knew it was fake now. You know what I'm so? So kind of just do that. And if, see, in Knoxville, most of the drug dealers are from out of town. Like people from Detroit and Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta all go to Knoxville.

Why is that? I think like bigger cities, like Detroit, it seems like there's lots of drug dealers there. You know what I mean? And so they just kind of branch out and go to these mid-level cities. You know what I mean? Knoxville is not big, but it's not small. There's money there. There's a lot of drug addicts there.

So you've got a lot of people from out of town. Like it's known in Knoxville that Detroit Boys is what everybody calls them Detroit Boys, because it's just a group, a large group of people from Flint, Michigan, Detroit, Michigan. And I was doing business with a lot of those guys. Yeah. I mean, Tennessee is known for being like, there's so many, like, oxy documentaries in Tennessee. It's crazy. Like, just, like the opioid epidemic ripped through Tennessee.

Yeah, it's heroin now. Fentanyl. It's straight up heroin. It's fentanyl. Fentanyl. Really? Yeah. People purposely taking fentanyl?

Oh, yeah. For sure. Really. I mean, there are still people that kind of deny its existence. Oh, no, this is real heroin, but it's all, I mean, it's all real fentanyl. The crazy thing now that people are talking about is, like, people that are, they say people that buy cocaine are accidentally. dentally overdosing on fentanyl.

But I saw like a, like, it seems like a weird thing because fentanyl is the opposite of cocaine. Yeah. Right. So if somebody's overdosing on fentanyl and they're buying cocaine, it seems like it would be counterintuitive to the person that's selling that cocaine. Yeah, I agree. I'm not sure if there's, I mean, obviously there's cases where people overdose. Like, you're not going to cut cocaine with fentanyl.

No. Their customers obviously aren't going to like that. The only reason I could think of is either. Either A, because fentanyl is physically addictive, they might add a little bit in to get people, like, physically hooked on it. Or, I mean, fentanyl is so potent that, like, literally a tiny, like, if you had fentanyl in a Ziploc bag, and you poured it out to make your heroin or whatever,

and there was even residue left in that bag. If you then put cocaine in that bag, there's still enough fentanyl to hurt someone that doesn't have a tolerance to it. Right. You know what I mean? That's what I'm saying. It would make more sense that, like, if, say, a drug dealer was selling, because I know that they cut heroin with fentanyl, right?

Yeah. So if like a drug dealer sold heroin and sold coke, maybe they cut it up on the same table and a little bit of fentanyl accidentally got into the cocaine, that would make sense. Yeah, for sure. But they would never purposely cut. And you've got to think, people who are cutting heroin with fentanyl are probably cutting their coke too with some kind of. With something else. With something else.

With, you know, if they use the same blender to mix up their products or, you know, I'm sure there's cases like that, but everything's circumstantial, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm sure there's probably are people that do purposely throw fentanyl in it, just who knows, you know what I? But I think it's different cases for, you know, everybody. Just shit happens. So people are, are really fucked up on fentanyl, Tennessee right now.

Yeah, meth and heroin. Well, they say, like I said, I say heroin. It's really, it's mostly fentanyl. Everything I've seen, it's like just plain white powder, which isn't heroin, you know what I mean. But, yeah, it's pretty bad in Knoxville. Meth, too. Meth is a big one.

Really? Oh, yeah. When did fentanyl start becoming a big thing out there? Well, I guess I'm from Tampa, so I mean, the last eight years I've lived in Knoxville. And when I first moved there, it was still like pills, like rocksies. But they just got too expensive. So, I mean, I'd say I started noticing fentanyl probably five, six years ago, you know. But it's like, I mean...

They say it's like 10 times more potent than morphine, right? Oh, it's more than that. More than 10 times. Well, there's different kinds, too. There's like fentanyl, car fentanyl. And then there's other designer, you know, U47700, which is like just, you know, random designer drugs. But yeah, they're super strong obiates nowadays. They're making China and ship over here.

Knoxville is bad. Like, if you walk to a gas station, you'll probably have one or two people pull up. and offer you heroin. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So that, I mean, that was good as far as having counterfeit money. Strangers come up to you and offer to sell you drugs.

Of course, you're going to, I'll buy some. You can fake money. Yeah. You know what I mean? Right. For sure. Especially if you never going to see him again, right? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I try to keep doing business with them, but there was also, like, sketchy points when, you know, you wonder if they did find out if they're pissed off. You don't want to call them the next day to buy more if they found out. if they found out so you really have to you know read people over the phone like I said in my case luckily most people uh you know weren't angry you know I mean right there was one guy that the guy that actually ultimately set me up and with the feds um when I first met him I was basically like my roommate roommate this girl was getting heroin from him uh you know with my money and And we got them for probably, I'd say close to 10 grand over the course of like a few weeks or something. And I guess he's one of his, the bills was in his pocket and it was raining. So that color shifting the makeup that I paint on wiped off because it got wet. So he ultimately found out that the bills were fake.

And I pulled in my driveway one day and he was standing in my driveway like yelling at my roommate. So I'm like, oh, fuck. This is going to be a problem. You know what I mean? But he didn't know that they were coming from me. He was because she was the one getting it. So I just walked by and hear him yell. And he's like, I don't care.

I'm not mad. I just want to know where the fuck you got him from. You know what I mean? So when I heard that, I started selling them to him. You know what I mean? I basically said, like, listen, they're coming for me. You know, I'll sell them to you for, you know, 20, 25 cents on the dollar. So he was buying anywhere from $5,000, $10,000 worth every time he'd go up to

Cleveland to re-up like he'd go and pick up a brick, a kilo heroin or whatever, usually cut it to two, but nonetheless, he'd want at least like 10 grand worth of my bills to mix in with, you know, his real money. Really? So he would give you 10 grand and you would give him 40 grand? No, I never did that much. It was more like I'd give him 10 and he'd give me 2,500. Oh, okay.

I mean, I had multiple different people that I was doing those kind of deals with. Yeah. But, you know, he'd normally buy, like, a brick at a time. So, you know, if he was spending 40 grand, he'd want 10, maybe 15,000 of my money to mix in with it. You know what I mean? So, we were mixing in this fake money with real money. So there, I mean, it's hard to, it's, you couldn't tell that the bills were fake if I handed you one and told you they were fake, let alone mixing it in with, you know, $40,000 of other real money. Right.

You just mix it in randomly. Yeah. So I had a couple different, like a group of a couple different guys from Cleveland, probably about five different guys from Detroit, a couple guys from Atlanta. And then, you know, there's random other people that were from Knoxville. But, you know, so. So you said this is the guy that initially set you up? Yeah.

Eventually, he was the one. How far into this? shit did you get before he set you up like how long did you were you working with him uh with i was doing the counterfeiting thing for about two years i think he came in the picture probably the last i want to say six eight months like we had a good uh you know so like like i said the bible paper thing um it was hard to come by so after going to bookstores and all this so i basically i was went to a hotel one day and went in the the end table to get the bible to you know get a couple pieces of paper out of it or whatever um and there wasn't there so i i waved down the maintenance man

and was like hey there's not a bible in my room can you get me a bible so he was like yeah i'll get you one i'll be right back i was like you know what you guys not keep bibles in the nightstand anymore and he's like no we stopped doing that i got boxes full of bibles in the maintenance closet so i was like you know like give me those box i'll pay you for those boxes you know i got a lot of praying and you yeah and that that particular guy actually like i I think I gave him like a hundred bucks for all these boxes of Bibles or something. And so I got them in the room. There's probably like five boxes.

I went through, took all the blank pages and then just went through the boxes in the dumpster. So he noticed that and he was like, I remember he was like asking me, like, why the fuck did you just pay me for these Bibles and then throw them away? You know, it didn't make sense to him. But, yeah, so we started basically paying maintenance men at different hotels to, you know, bring me boxes of Bibles, which that definitely. increased the production, you know. So this guy was going up to Cleveland. How many bills could you fit in one Bible page? It depends.

Like your typical Bible about like this that you'd find in a hotel room or something, it's just one side per page. So like, because I'm printing the front and the back. So like those, you know, out of, there's usually like about four pages in those little Bibles. So, I mean, it's worth 200 bucks. So it's not that you need it to. get lots of them but there there's other specific types of of bibles like for instance the jeremiah

study bible specifically it's it's a study bible so the back was full of blank pages to take notes on it said like notes at the top and it was just like 30 blank pages and the bible was probably you know this big notes so we're printing notes all right so you could fit probably three sides like a front a back and another front on one page and you know they were was say 40 blank pages. So, you know, what is that? 40 times 3. 120.

I mean, one Bible's worth about 10 grand. Okay. You know what I mean? So, like, if you go into a Barnes & Noble, for instance, there's probably two or three copies of the Jeremiah Study Bible and get those. And then, you know, random other ones. I mean, like I said, a bookstore, you could probably get about, say, 50, at least 50,000 worth of paper from one bookstore.

Okay. But most cities only have like two bookstores in the city. Right. You know what I mean? So you go to Chattanooga, but you hit the two bookstores there, you know, that's $50,000, $100,000 out of Chattanooga. You know, you go to Atlanta. There's say three bookstores there. There's 150 out of Atlanta.

But it comes to a point to where I went to Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, you know, Severeville, Lexington, Cleveland, you know, you just. Because when you're busting these bills, you also want to travel. travel around. You know, I mean, I think I think the number that I spent in Knoxville was like $380,000 throughout businesses in Knoxville, which that I got a little ballsy. You spent $380,000, not just on Bibles, but like spending the money. No, just, yeah, shopping. To convert that money into, you know, real money, you'd go shopping, you'd buy something for $10, $20. What kind of shit were you buying? Oh, just random shit. I got the time, you know, I had a heroin habit. So, It was converted to cash, and then, you know, I'd buy visa cars to pay for the hotel rooms and, you know, had some designer bags, jewelry, shit like that.

I mean, nothing was no like Ferraris. But, you know, I mean, you know, just living comfortably. Right, right. Wow. So how did this guy eventually set you up? So one day he told me he was like, oh, I bought this, it was, I think a 2009 charger or something. something. I guess one of these dudes that was buying dope from

him was like, oh, he sold him a car for, like, I think it was $500 in an eight ball of heroin for a 2009 charger. So I was like, bro, that's a stolen car. 100%. He's like, no, the guy gave me a title. He's like, it's all good. I'm going to go register it. I was like,

bro, you bought that from a junkie for $500. Bro, it's a fucking stolen car. I promise you. Either way, he was convinced because he had the title. The guy has a title to him. I was supposed to go up to Cleveland with him. We had maintenance guy that was going to give us some Bibles up there. I was going to bust bills throughout the city while he re-uped on some dope.

But the day before we were supposed to leave, I ended up getting arrested for a failure to appear, like a little warrant I had. So I got arrested the next day, Bond out. But he already went without me, I guess. So we were renting a house together, and I was kind of, you know, printing the money out of the back, and he was selling dope out of the front, and we shared this house. So I bond out of jail on that little charge, and I go home, and his little runner chick, summer, she basically said, like, oh, he went up to Cleveland without you.

So I was like, okay, whatever, you know what I mean? And then she basically said, like, don't, you know, he told me not to tell you this, but he got arrested up in Cleveland. So instantly, I was like, you know, why would he tell you not to tell me? Like, that's sketchy. You know, it's a red flag for sure. And I knew at first, I figured it was probably that car. I'm like, I knew that car was stolen, you know what I mean? But I also knew he was going up there with, he had 20,000 real cash and 5,000 in my bills.

that's time. So I knew, you know, whether it was because of the car or not, he most likely got caught with, you know, counterfeit money or heroin, one of the two, you know. And, you know, by him telling her not to tell me that he got arrested is, in my mind, he's cooperating, you know, and trying to, he's going to set me up or attempt to at some point. So, um, I got, you know, my computers and printers and I had ventilation fans to spray the lacquer indoors or suck it out the window. You had like a whole production studio. Yeah, like a counterfeiting little setup, you know what I mean? But when I found out he was locked up, I got everything and went to a hotel. I was like, fuck this, I'm leaving. Which I'm, well, I mean, I'm glad I did, but ultimately I got arrested anyway. So I'm staying in a hotel. And this other group of Detroit guys put in like an order for like $6,000.

So I was, my plan was to wake up. make this 6,000 to give these Detroit guys. My wife at the time was going to go shopping, whatever. It was just like a normal day, every day. And this dude E, the guy from Cleveland, calls me. So he basically was like, hey, I've got that book, a box of Bibles for you. And I was like, well, just hold on to him. I don't want to meet up right now.

You know what I mean? Like I assume he's cooperating. And he basically said, I was like, eventually basically, I was like why you know you just got arrested why didn't you tell me that you know what I mean like why did you tell some or not to tell me bro you're acting you're acting fucking sketchy and you know he had this story which kind of made sense but I still didn't trust him you know he basically said yeah that car was stolen I got arrested for it the money I was gonna use to buy the dope I had to bond out with so I couldn't re-up in Cleveland so now I'm back in Knoxville and I need to re-up can you get me like

a 700 grams from your Detroit people, which is like, I don't sell, you know, I didn't really sell a lot of drugs like that. You know what I mean? So for him to ask me that over the phone, after he just got out of jail, like, it was a huge red flag. And he's trying to set me up for things that I don't even do. You know what I mean? Like, I'm doing the counterfeiting thing. So basically, like, he asked me that.

And I was like, listen, bro, like, we're not having this conversation, especially not over the phone. You know, what are you talking about? You're the drug dealer. I'm not. Goodbye. So I hang up. I guess the, they GPS pinged my phone, though, to my location. So they knew, they didn't know which room I was in, but they knew that I was in the extended stay hotel in West Knoxville.

So, you know, like I said, that next morning my wife's going to go shopping. I was going to, you know, print 6,000 for this guy. So they leave. And I didn't know this at the time, but I guess as soon as my wife got in the car. car and started to pull out they swarmed her you know i mean the police it was uh knox uh kpd organized crime unit drug task force cleveland secret service knoxville secret service you know multiple different agencies uh so basically i but i didn't know this my wife just left to go shopping you know so i'm in there hanging paper spraying it cutting printing all this stuff and i i hear a knock on the door

and i you know look through the people uh and it's just just black. Like somebody's thumb was over the people. So at first I was thinking like, oh, these is like, maybe somebody's trying to rob me or something. I didn't know because, but I look out the window and I saw a line at Knox County Sheriff's. You know what I mean? So.

Oh, fuck. Yeah, I go to flush some of the money that I was printing. I threw a bunch in the toilet and flushed it, you know, went down, threw a bunch more and went to flush it and they shut the water off because they thought I had a bunch of kilos of drugs in there and stuff. Oh, okay. So there was a bunch of one-sided, like, unfinished

counterfeit money all in the toilet and fucking... So the toilet wouldn't flush? It did the first time, but the second time, I guess. No good. But, I mean, at that point, I was already in there with, you know, I'm in a hotel room. There's nowhere to go.

What kind of shit did you have in that? You had printers in there. Yeah, printers, computers, uh, you know, all the different sprays. My little glass light board to like cut everything on and line everything up with and the worst part was the files on the computer oh really all those serial numbers i changed every serial number so when they

got the computer as evidence that basically linked me to all these different serial numbers that they found throughout the country yeah that was that was a wrap at that point so what was going through your head bro when you were trying to flush that stuff wasn't going you knew those sheriffs were outside like what an attack and then those doors at that hotel was like steel reinforced so like it took them a long time to kick it in it oh really i mean it took about five minutes so you wouldn't open you didn't open it hell no i mean i mean i you know would you do why they were trying to kick it in i think i just sat there and smoked a cigarette and i was like man what i'm you know what are you going to do at that point i think once they started kicking in

the door it was already like bent and fucked up so you probably couldn't open it if you know if i wanted It's on. You just sit there and wait for them, you know. But, yeah, they charged me on, uh, originally, or at first, it was state charges, uh, until the, the feds could compile evidence and all, because they didn't know who I was until that guy E told them like two days before that and then they came down from Cleveland to set me up. So they didn't have any drugs on you when they busted through the door? I think there was a couple grams, but nothing like, like, like distribute, like,

no, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't selling drugs, you know. I mean. So when they busted through the door, then what happened? Like, what they say to you? What they do to you? You know, slam your ass on the ground and handcuffed me. You know, they told me, we've got, you know, your wife outside. She's in custody.

There was, you know, an arm, like, just so many cops everywhere. You know what I mean? They took me in on state charges of criminal simulation over 60,000. And, you know, I think it took like two and a half, three months for the feds to finally compile all their evidence because they went, got a warrant to go through the computer. You know what I mean? Get all the evidence they needed and then they served me in indictment about two and a half, three months later. Wow. So you were sitting in like a just like a state prison before that?

At first it was just Knox County Jail. It was in a jail, just like the local jail for months. then the, when the feds got involved, then what happened? Like, did what change once the FBI got involved? Well, it's a secret service. Oh, it's a secret service. They handle financial crimes. They handled the money shit, right?

But yeah, basically, they took me to court one day, and my public defender was like, you know, they're dropping their charges on you. But I, because I knew the state or the feds were going to pick them up, you know what I mean? If the state drops them. So basically they, you know, went to court. The state dropped all charges.

charges and then they walked me across the street to the federal Marshall building and they served me in the indictment for the conspiracy at first it was a five count indictment for let's see it was conspiracy to counterfeit U.S. obligations like a couple counts of uttering U.S. obligations and I think it was like sale and manufacturer of counterfeit U.S. obligations so that you know eventually I pled to just one count of the conspiracy to counterfeit because they don't they don't they're all run, you know, concurrent anyway. So they basically just give you the biggest charge and, you know, drop the other ones. So what did they charge you with? They charged you. They gave you one charge and how long do they sentence you? Well, originally in the feds, it's like a, it's a range. You know what I mean? You get like, you know, 12 to 18 months or, you know, so it's like, um, originally I was

looking at, it was like three years about, give or take. So they came to me with this deal and said, if you can, you know, plead guilty and show us how you made these bills, make a video to train future agents. You know, basically just to explain all the evidence, what it was, how I learned about it, you know, all that, and make a training video for future Secret Service agents, then they would not charge them.

my wife and keep the restitution amount under $100,000 because that's an enhancement. So once it was, once you make more than $100,000, you get more time. You know what I mean? Because it's like an enhancement in the fed. So they basically said they were like at this point, we found $380,000 in Knoxville. We're still finding about $10,000 a week coming in through the bank. So they were like, if you plead guilty now, we'll keep it at under $100. and not charge your wife.

So basically I made like a video. They flew a film crew down to Knoxville and like filmed me making bills. Really? In the Secret Service headquarters. Really? Yeah. What was that like? So you were imprisoned while you had to film this, right?

Like you were still doing your time? No, no. They actually, well, they let me out on pretrial release for some months before I was sentenced. And that's when I did all that. So the Secret Service flew. a film crew down to your house to the Secret Service headquarters Oh the Secret Service headquarters

Knoxville. You met them there. Yeah. Did you like, how did you, did you have to give them like a list of equipment and shit? Or like how did that work? Basically they just went through and asked me like exactly, you know,

what certain chemicals were, why I had certain things. What did I, you know, use them for? How did I find out that I could use them for? You know what I mean? Um, because I had,

I would always experiment with stuff trying to make the bills better. You know what I mean? So I had like that makeup, right, that I made the color shifting pigment out of. There was one kind that was the best. But I had like a bunch of other ones because I'd experiment. And I was working on doing the new blue notes as well. And that's got a different color shifts. So I had stuff to match that color shifting.

A certain type of nail polish mixed in with a color shifting pigment. out online. If you mix them together, it makes a perfect copper to gold, like on the new hundreds. So there was stuff like that. And like I found a, it's like a fine tip ballpoint glue pen. So it's like a regular big pen, except it pushes out glue instead of ink. So like some people to test if a bill's real, they'll scratch the shirt is what they say, which means you feel the texture. You know, you kind of run your fingernail along his t-shirt. on the portrait of the president to feel the texture. So I ran across a couple cashiers that would do that.

So I had this little glue pen that I'd draw little lines on real quick to give this rigid texture on the shirt. Just little things like that that they've never, the Secret Service hasn't seen before or was wondering why I had, you know, these pens or this, you know, this or that basically. Yeah. And, you know, I basically took my computer, you know, printed a couple bills glued them sprayed the lacquer you know explained what i was doing

and uh you know they counted that as as cooperation to to give me from three years it got knocked down to 10 months wow 10 months it seems like i mean obviously it's a long fucking time but it doesn't it doesn't seem like that long for all the shit that you were doing um i mean no it's it was definitely a blessing you know you know You know, because there was drug dealers that I met multiple ones that I would, they'd find out the bills were fake after I was ripping them off or whatever. And I'd offer to sell them, sell them the bills. And they'd be like, no, I don't want to fuck with that. You know what I mean?

That's serious shit. And it's like there are people, you know, trafficking kilos of heroin with guns on them and stuff. And they're worried about kind of her bills, you know. Right. You weren't doing anything violent. No. Yeah. So, I mean, the time for, I mean, it's a white color crime.

So most white-collar crimes don't look at nearly as much time as drugs and guns. They don't like drugs and guns. So how long do the process take for you to film that training video for the Secret Service? It was probably like two hours. Two hours. And how many bills did you make for them? Oh, just two. Just two.

I didn't know at the time. My lawyer was pregnant at the time. I felt bad after the fact because I was showing them everything, and then I take this lacquer spray can, and I started spraying it and she was like oh I gotta leave the room and like ran out

and I didn't think I was like oh I'm sorry that smells you know what I mean but later I found out that she was pregnant so I felt bad about that

you know what I mean but she is all good with it oh my God that's so wild so what so you only did 10 months what was the 10 months like

was it a low low security yeah well it was it was a administrative facility like a camp

no it wasn't a camp It was a, it's a low security, basically. There's camps, lows, you know, medium and highs. But I went, I was in, I got sentenced, then I had to sit in Knox County Jail for, you know, a couple weeks. And then they sent me to Blunt County Jail, which is the federal holding facility for East Tennessee. Sat there for like a month. Then they shipped me to London, Kentucky, Laurel County is like another federal holding facility. is just kind of a holdover until they get you to the compound.

And then they sent me to FMC Lexington, which is, like I said, it's an administrative low, so it houses low, medium, and highs, but it's essentially a low, low security. And, you know, it wasn't bad, shot some pool, you know, worked out a little bit. Really? Yeah. What kind of guys did you meet in there?

Matt Cox type people? No, not. Surprisingly not. No? I was one of the few. There was a couple guys that did. One dude was doing credit card fraud, I think. Okay.

He was like, he owned a company and was like basically like overcharging people who, you know, gave him its credit card, like bought a product from him. And then he like overcharge him and then refund him. And he had some kind of scam where he made it made out on top. And, man, and, like, and. Lexington, Kentucky was mostly drugs and guns. You know what I mean? It weren't a lot of white. I was one of the few, like, white-collar criminals.

I was the only counterfeiter there. Really? Actually, there was one guy that was counterfeiting chicks. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it's super rare for people to counterfeit that amount of bills, right? Like, you said in the beginning of this that you were one of, like, how many that have been, that have served federal times?

for doing that. There's a lot of people that have served time for counterfeiting, but most, in the Secret Service told me this, they said they were like, these are the best bills we've seen in 25 years. And he was like, the majority of all their counterfeiting cases are

like, you know, teenagers, you know, just photocopying, you know. And they don't look good and they usually print $1,000 and then get caught and then, you know what I mean? So, there's not a lot of like professional counterfeiter out there. I only know of like two.

You know, Matt was saying he did the 12 years and he said I think he's only met one or two and they were... That's what he told me today. He's like, yeah, I've met two people ever that have done this. And they were probably just you know, photocopying bills. You know what I mean? So like

it's hard to print money because the printer is recognized, if you try to just print a bill the printer will recognize it and it won't allow you to print. You know what I mean? So you can go and do a photo copier machine and just make a copy but then they're going to look horrible.

You know what I mean? So I got around that by instead of scanning the bill because if you scan it it'll just put some like penal code as to why you're not allowed to scan a money or whatever. So I'd take a high resolution camera and take a photo of it and then upload that photo

and then adjust take it to an Adobe Photoshop the photo and edit everything and layer it. I layered it into three different images. So when you went to print it, you weren't just printing one bill. So, you know, the printer couldn't recognize it. I'd print, like, just the background color.

And then I'd print all the blackwork over it. And then I'd print the Treasury seal and serial numbers. So it was multiple different prints. You printed each layer separately. Yeah. So the printer couldn't recognize that I was printing money. You know what I mean? So it kind of got around.

So how many layers total? And then so you'd print how many layers of this Bible paper? Well, I mean layers as in, like, digital. Right. Like on Adobe, I'd break it to three different pictures. You know, one was just the background color. Basically, the front of the bills had three different prints. I'd print three times just from the front of the bill.

Okay. And then the back of the bill, I did two prints. Oh, on the same piece of paper. Yeah, yeah. Got it. Okay. So, like, you're just printing a background color first. So it's just that beige color of money.

It's just a solid rectangle of that color. And then you put it back in the printer and print all the ink, you know, the black stuff. and then put it through again and print the treasury seal and serial numbers. So there was three prints for the front, two prints for the back, and then one print for the strip and the watermark. Wow. Yeah, so that was tricky. I had to, like, in order to print, because the Bible paper is too thin.

It'll jam up in the printer. You know, I mean, so you have to tape it onto a piece of regular printer paper. So it's, you know, thick enough to go through and be printed on. Right. So, like, I'd always, me and my wife would stay up. up all night just taping Bible paper to print until we had a stack like this you know what I mean and then the next day we just run them all through and print them out um you know so it's hard it's hard to basically counterfeit I mean most people when they found out the bills were fake or or you know

knew what I was doing they'd instantly be like I want you know sell me a million dollars worth and it's like you know each bill you're literally handcrafting you know what I mean you're print it's take multiple prints and then you got to cut them out spray them with you know if you spray too much gorilla glue it'll fuck up and be too thick if you don't spray enough it'll the pieces will separate so you know it became a fine art of you know spraying just the right amount gluing them together making sure they're lined up and then spraying the lacquer a thick coat first a thinner coat to give it that texture you don't want to spray too much lacquer because then it'll be too thick it won't feel right

So, I mean, it was a real, like, fine-toothed process of, you know, getting them just right. But after doing it, after about three, four, five months, I got to where, you know, it'd take me. I could probably make, like, a perfect counterfeit hundred and ten minutes. Really? So usually every day I'd make at least, even if nobody had any orders or anything, I'd make at least 25 bills, $2,500 every day. And that was just, like, the money I needed to survive. You know what I mean? I was spending at least $2,500 a day.

Really? Yeah. On drugs? Well, not all drugs, but, you know, and buy my drugs for the day. You know, we had this nanny that was working for us that, you know, in hotel rooms, out to dinners. 2,500 bucks a day. That's a lot. You're like the Tinder swindler. No. I haven't seen that. I'd like to watch that. Oh, my God. It's fucking insane.

But you've got to think 2,500 in counterfeit hundreds, like, in order to bust that and convert it to real money, you know, you're going and buying something for. $10, $20. So, you know, you buy some worthless shit for $20. You don't need just to bust that bill. Just to bust it, right. So out of that $2,500, you know, you're really getting a bunch of shit from Walmart and whatever that you, you know, may need, you may not need or whatever. But so you're probably getting, you know, $2,000 out of that $2,500, even just spending them at stores. Right. So, but yeah, $2,000 a day was kind of my standard minimum amounts of.

Has anybody ever, since you. you got out as anyone asked you for any uh like custom artwork or something or like uh no custom artwork of currency i've had some people want me to start counterfeit you know again yeah oh shit you can do because they find out my story and find out you know and they want me to sell them but you should make more and sell them but i you know what have you uh do you still like run in the same circles like have the same talk to the same people or has it been like difficult to kind of like like recalibrate your life since you got out? Yeah, I mean, I, uh, yeah, no, I'm, I'm sober now.

I've been sober for like two years now, so I don't really associate with any of those people anymore. It was mostly just like drug dealers, you know, so. Do you think you would have got, I mean, you probably wouldn't have got sober if you didn't go to prison, right? Probably not. Probably not. I mean, honestly, it, it definitely helped, you know, all around.

It was for the best, you know what I mean? I was kind of living a crazy. life for a long time. Has it been hard to adjust since you've gotten out? Like, has it been difficult to, like, find a place to live, to get work? And, like, what's that been like? Well, I just got out, like, three months ago. Oh, did you really?

Yeah. But luckily, I found a good job, man. It's working at a print shop. So, you know, and I was honest with them up front. I told them, like, listen, I'm on, you know, supervised release. for counterfeiting and, you know, they're all cool guys where I work. I mean, obviously your skill with like graphic design, Photoshop and that kind of shit, right? Did they respect that and be like, wow, you can actually like apply that to something used to.

And I've been in that trade. Like I was in the sign business before. So signs and graphics are all pretty related. You know what I mean? So I've worked at a couple print shops, vinyl shops beforehand. So I've got experience in it on top of the, you know, illegal experience. But yeah, they were, you know, they hired me and they're really cool understanding if I have to, you know, miss work to go to probation or whatever. Yeah.

They're all good, man. I've really lucked out with that job. Have you ever talked to, or I met any, obviously, I think you said mentioned that you met a guy in prison that did counterfeit credit cards. Did Matt mention that guy John Boziac to you? Yeah, we talked about him. He showed me a little sizzle reel or something for a documentary or something he's putting out. Yeah, he was doing something similar to what you were doing, where he was in a room basically printing out and forging credit cards.

Yeah. I saw, actually, I think I saw the concrete episode. Oh, did you really? Okay. Yeah, yeah. His story was fucking crazy. Yeah. I mean, once, like, he was, I'm sure, doing the same thing as far as, like,

once you can beat all those little security features, I mean, it ends up being perfect. You know what I mean, they just, and that's what the bills were like. I mean, if you've got a credit card with a hologram and embossed and, you know, everything right, and then people, and it works. Yeah. You know what I mean? Why would anyone think that it was fake? You know what I mean?

It's just success. Right. That's what the bills, you know, ended up being, it's just like they worked every time. You know what I mean? The only times that I ever got turned down was if I went to like a Walmart like too many times and I'd keep going, keep going. And then they'd, you know, eventually that hit the bank and the bank would inform manager. and that management.

Like one time I went and do a grocery store and I gave this bill to this cashier. She broke it. Like a week later, I happened to go back to the same grocery store. And it was the same cashier. I recognized her. And this time I handed her the bill and she held it up and was looking at the strip and the watermark, marked it with the pen, held it up again. And I was like, you know, was there a problem?

You know, and she's like, oh, yeah, we just, I got a counterfeit bill last week. so I'm just double-checking everything. And she still accepted it. You know what I mean? So like, and that happened a few different times. People would say like, oh, we've been getting counterfeit bills. But, I mean, if you mark it with the end. They don't know where they got it from.

Well, yeah. I mean, they're passing all the tests. There are certain tests a cashier does to, you know, see if it's real or not. Right. You know, everything was legitimate. You know, it all looked legitimate. So, yeah. But, yeah.

I mean, there were times to get, like, money. the orders and give them, you know, I've got the little victim list or whatever with all the bills that they found, you know, at different businesses. And there's some like get Western Union for $1,500 or there was one case where we knew the manager at a gas station that would just open the safe and just switch out, you know, fake bills for real bills. Oh shit. Yeah. So there's a bunch of different like little scams or ways to get them off you know i mean yeah it's an interesting it's a really like unique thing because it's like it doesn't really hurt one specific person you can kind of like pass it along you know what i mean like everyone can kind of benefit from it yeah for sure i mean

i wasn't i wasn't making enough money to like actually affect the economy right exactly right so really i mean what is i mean if if everyone thinks it's real it looks real and it passes everywhere Like, essentially, it's... Who are you hurting? You're not really hurting anybody, are you? Well, the judge seemed to think. The judge thought so. And the judge was really religious,

so she didn't really like the Bible paper thing. Oh, shit. I actually got arrested one time at a Walmart for theft because I was stealing Bible paper. Like, I went in, like, ripped a couple pages of Bible. Did she for ripping the Bible paper? Well, they saw me, they pulled me aside and say, oh, we saw you stuff, something.

in your pants, you know what I mean? Because I just put it in like, you know, the top of my pants after, you know, I took a Bible, took out some blank pages and tucked it in my pants. And they were like, you know, we know you're stealing something. We saw you stuff something in your pants. And finally, they like took it out and just saw a bunch of blank pages of fucking Bible paper. They're like, what is this? Like, why are you doing this?

And I didn't know what to tell them, you know what I mean? I can't admit to what I'm actually doing with it. So I was just like, I don't know what to tell you, bro. I probably looked fucking crazy. You know what I mean? but yeah they just gave me a little citation for a theft or whatever okay they didn't know you know why i was right ripping up blank pages and stuff you know me my pants it's kind of embarrassing but that's insane yeah um so are you like paying back certain amount of your your income to restitution

right now yeah uh the restitution like i said they kept it under 100 000 so i think it's like 96 000 some odd dollars that i got to pay back they don't make it easy to bounce back, man. Well, no, I mean, it's only been three months. I've been out, and yeah, it's not easy, for sure. I'm still living in a halfway house. Are you? Yeah, because me and my wife separated while I was in prison,

so I had to, basically, the house that I was going to go to in North Carolina, I couldn't because we were separating. So they had to send me back to the sentencing district. So I originally caught my charges in Knoxville, so I had to go back to Knoxville. So they took my car. I got no place, you know, so I just had to go to a halfway house, you know what I mean? But luckily I landed that job and, you know, I'll get back on my feet soon. Well, cool, bro. I really appreciate you coming down here and telling your story, man.

I'm sure people are going to love it. Tell it if, is there a place that people can, like, find you if they want to, like, reach out to you or? I mean, I'm on Facebook. I was talking to Matt about starting a podcast maybe, you know, dealing with, you know, fraud and white collar cards and stuff. Yeah, you should. I haven't gotten to it yet. I've been out three months, but I'm going to work, too, everything. So people want to, like, hit you up or talk to you, or they can hit you up on Facebook?

Yeah, Jeff Turner on Facebook. Cool. Awesome, Jeff. Well, thanks again, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.